IT'S hard to imagine now," says Stan Howes, "but when we came out of the Civic Theatre, there were about 500 or 600 people - mostly girls - screaming, and we were not able to get to the van with our clothes on.

"One of the lads was dragged to the ground and my sleeves were torn off."

It was the mid-1960s, and you were unable to move in south Durham without bumping into someone who was in a Beat band.

As Echo Memories has been telling in recent weeks, every pub and club in the land had a Beat band playing every weekend night - the Downbeats, the Concordes, Jet Storme and the Cyclones, Ben Gunn and the Lawmen, The Three Pin Square...

Stan Howes started off in the Black Nights, who were one of the five Beat bands - each with five members - who starred in the legendary Five by Five show at Darlington's Civic Theatre in 1964.

The whole district seems to have erupted in an adolescent frenzy of mop-topped guitarists and their screaming fans.

The Black Nights were the resident band at the Lyric cinema in Middleton St George (recently converted into a private house).

"They used to come from all over - Middlesbrough, Stockton, Darlington," says Stan. "It was often take your partners for the next punch-up."

The night JFK was assassinated, the Nights were playing at the Cavern Club in Hurworth Place - strangely, an upstairs room at the Station pub.

However, local bands have a habit of splitting and reforming rather like a shoal of small fish with a hungry shark swimming through it.

"There was always band politics," says Stan. "You were just getting established and someone would upset the apple cart and you had to start all over again."

And so the Black Nights - occasionally spelt as Knights - mutated into Union Jackson and the Patriotic Band, with red, white and blue everywhere.

Union Jackson's first gig was at the Eldon Lane Working Men's Club in October 1967 and, for a brief nine months, Dennis Watson was their organist. He was home from university for a year's work experience.

By '67, the Beatles hubbub was dying down - people were moving towards the Stones' soully-blues feel. Union Jackson played soully-pop - Knock on Wood was the high point of their show - in workingmen's clubs from Crook to Bishop Auckland to Darlington.

"At a gig at the Cleveland Bridge Social Club in Darlington, I met my wife, Jacqueline," says Dennis.

The highlight of Union Jackson's career came on February 9, 1968, when they supported Freddie and the Dreamers at the Press Ball held in the Baths Hall in Darlington's Kendrew Street.

"They used to empty all the water and put wooden panels over the swimming pool and that became the dance floor," says Dennis.

"It was a very big hall, and needed a powerful amp and I remember my colleagues clubbed together to hire a big Vox."

The Northern Despatch reported that the ball raised a record £400 for local charities.

"Freddy and his dreamers kept dancers laughing and tapping their feet for over an hour in their cabaret spot, and the floor was packed for dancing to the West Indian All-Star Steel Band and Johnny Taws and his Orchestra after an early evening 'session' with the Union Jackson Beat group."

Soon after, Dennis returned to college. Union Jackson prepared for a month-long tour of Switzerland and Sweden which was cancelled at the last minute due to "student riots and teenage unrest".

Instead, they recorded a single, Everybody Needs Love - "Dick Emery, the well-known comedian, is plugging for us," said the new drummer Rick Carter, 21, of Newton Aycliffe. "He's a good friend of ours." - and headed for Germany instead.

The band were now pro and, at the start of the 1970s, they mutated again, and became Crack of Dawn. In 1975, as a comedy showband, they made it onto television.

"We came second from bottom on New Faces," says Stan. "The problem was that it was all North-East colloquial humour which depended on the workingmen's clubs. In a few weeks, we had to change it for New Faces and, of course, it didn't work."

By then, the pub and club scene was changing. There weren't many live music venues and Stan had his business - Cybertronic, the longest established alarms company in Darlington - to concentrate upon.

He is noew building his fifth aeroplane and writing a book on the history of the Middleton St George airport.

Dennis Watson is now head of support services in the development and environment department at Darlington council.

He hasn't touched a keyboard since he took his old one to the tip ten years ago, "but I do have musical ambitions for when I retire", he says.